BT chooses Ciena’s DCI platform to help increase capacity

To support growing traffic demands of 5G and FTTP, BT has chosen to deploy Ciena’s Waveserver stackable data centre interconnect (DCI) platform to increase the capacity connecting its data centres to the UK’s main internet peering nodes.

BT’s has plans to deploy 5G in 16 cities in 2019, while forecasting residential broadband growth to remain at roughly 40 per cent annually. This means that significant new capacity is required in all areas of the network, and particularly on the main core links carrying this traffic.

Ciena’s DCI platform is designed to enable this quickly, reliably, and more economically, turning up larger and multiple low-latency connections to its data centres. Waveserver supports high-speed data transfer, virtual machine migration, disaster recovery and backup between data centres. With a compact design that helps reduce real estate costs, the platform also offers scalability and ease of deployment.

Said Neil J. McRae, chief architect at BT: ‘We are launching 5G in 2019 across the busiest parts of 16 UK cities, and our FTTP footprint is growing on a daily basis. We have to stay ahead of the massive traffic growth that this brings, and the Ciena DCI platform ensures we can do that – quickly, making maximum use of automation.’

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